‘India's Covid caseload has risen sharply in the past few weeks. The country's been reporting more than 150,000 cases a day. In January and February daily cases fell below 20,000.
‘So, how did India get from relative calm to its new crisis? Workplaces, markets and malls have reopened, and transport is operating at full capacity. Big weddings, festivals and election rallies are also being held. The result: a situation that one doctor described as a "Covid tsunami".’
View here (BBC, Apr 15, 2021)
‘Dr K Senthil had feared it was coming. He had feared it as he saw the reckless crush of hundreds of people taking part in large wedding parties over the past months, feared it as he saw the maskless faces of shoppers at the market, feared it as he witnessed thousands come together for political rallies in the ongoing elections in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where he is the president of the state medical council.
‘But despite his growing sense of foreboding, the second wave of coronavirus that began to engulf India last month has confounded even Senthil’s worst expectations.’
Read here (The Guardian, Apr 14, 2021)
‘Manaus and cities like it will continue to generate dangerous viral variants if vaccination campaigns are not expanded to broadly reach all nations, rich or poor...
‘Manaus was devastated by a first wave of COVID cases beginning last March. Excess deaths—the 3,457 people in the city who died above the expected mortality figures between March 19 and June 24, 2020—represented 0.16 percent of Manaus’s relatively young population. And 7 percent of men older than 75 died at the peak of the spread.
‘Infections were so prevalent that researchers at the University of São Paulo and their colleagues concluded that Manaus was the first city in the world to reach herd immunity—the point at which enough people are immune to a virus that the spread of new infections is hindered. Their preliminary preprint study estimated that 66 percent of the population had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 (they later revised their figure to 76 percent as of October). The threshold for COVID herd immunity is unknown, but projections often cited range from 60 to 90 percent. Similarly high rates of infection have also been found in the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon...
‘In December 2020 a second wave did hit. And by January the city’s health system, which serves communities across the Amazon, had collapsed. ICUs were full to bursting, and oxygen supplies became exhausted. Some patients were airlifted to other regions of Brazil. But many died of asphyxiation on makeshift beds in hospital corridors or their home, doctors say.
‘More severe than the first one, the new wave took Manaus by surprise. Wearing masks and practicing social distancing had been discarded in the belief the city had reached herd immunity. Caseloads surged out of control, and bleak milestones from last year were surpassed. In January alone more than 3,200 excess deaths were logged, Orellana says.’
Read here (Scientific American, Mar 29, 2021)